A lot of our users wanted to use feature toggles in their single-page and native applications. To solve this in a performant and privacy concerned way we built The Unleash Proxy

The Unleash Proxy sits between the Unleash API and the application. It provides a simple and super-fast API, as it has all the data it needs available in memory.

The Unleash-Proxy uses the Unleash SDK and exposes a simple API. The Proxy will synchronise with the Unleash API in the background and provide a simple HTTP API for clients.

The Unleash Proxy API

The Unleash-Proxy has a very simple API. It takes the Unleash Context as input and will return the feature toggles relevant for that specific context. 

Client - unleash-proxy illustration
Example of the communication.

We care about Privacy!

The Unleash Proxy is important because you should not expose your entire toggle configurations to your end users! Single page apps works in context of a specific user. The proxy will only return the evaluated toggles (with variants) that should be enabled for those specific users in that specific context.

Most of our customers prefer to run The Unleash Proxy themselves. PS! We actually prefer this as we don’t want to see your users. Running it is pretty simple, it is either a small Node.js process you start or a docker image you use. (We can of course host the proxy for you also.)

How to connect to the Proxy?

The Unleash Proxy takes the heavy lifting of evaluating toggles and only returns enabled toggles and their values to the client. This means that you would get away with a simple http-client in many common use-cases.

However in some settings you would like a bit more logic around it to make it as fast as possible, and keep up to date with changes.

For single-page apps we have a tiny proxy-client in JavaScript, without any external dependencies, except from browser APIs. This client will store toggles relevant for the current user in localstorage and synchronise with the Unleash Proxy in the background. This means we can bootstrap the toggles for a specific use the next time the user visits the web-page.

We are working on providing similar native clients for Android and iOS. If you are interested please reach out to learn more.

Can I host the proxy my-self?

We are in a limited beta with selected customers to allow self-hosting of the unleash-proxy. This is especially important if you want to use unleash together with serverless functions such as AWS Lambda. If you are interested in this please let us know.